Global cities/urban subjects: The literary rearticulation of identity.

摘要

My dissertation examines how contemporary literary texts register the subjective experience of globality in global cities. I delimit the scope of my interrogation of globalization to the global city for two reasons: First, the Social Sciences have established that the concept of the global city---meaning those cities whose economic functions have been almost uniformly transformed by globalization---is a prime site for the investigation of the city-dweller's subjective experience of globality. Second, interrogating global urban consciousness throws into relief the relationship between literature and the conditions for its production in globalized city spaces. Through a combination of interpretation based on close reading, and explanation based on symptomatic reading, my project explains and analyzes what a subject's experience of the city can tell us about globalization's transformations of history, locality, and identity. Focussing on London, Tokyo, and Toronto, I read texts by such authors as Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, and Margaret Atwood in order to explain how these texts register the global city as the material and conceptual condition for the possibility of rearticulating identity.; The analyses and explanations of these texts reveal that literature produced in global cities discloses problems of identity-making in ways that complicate local-global binaries, and the strain of globalization theory which maintains that globalization fosters cultural homogeneity. Literary texts register these complications because of the way they articulate various histories---social, cultural, political, and of course literary. A literary text can tell us something about the historical moment if we understand the relationship between this moment and the production of the text. In other words, to paraphrase Pierre Macherey, we will understand more about the historical moment if read a work with a view not to trying to fathom its intentions, but with a view to understanding how it is produced out of a complex network of determinate conditions. In my study, globalization's relationship to the transformations in global cities forms the complex network of determinate condition of the works that my explanations seek to register.